Assessing Place-Based Access to Healthy Food
Despite gains over the past decade, limited access to healthy food continues to affect urban and rural communities across the United States. Financing the construction of new supermarkets and the expansion of existing stores is one of the primary strategies to increase access to sources of healthy food in underserved communities. Reinvestment Fund’s Limited Supermarket Access (LSA) analysis is a tool to help investors and policymakers identify areas across the 48 contiguous United States and the District of Columbia that have both inadequate and inequitable access to healthy food and sufficient market demand for new or expanded food retail operations.
The LSA analysis was first developed in 2011 to support Reinvestment Fund’s Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative (FFFI), which used strategic financing to attract supermarkets to distressed communities and to assist small stores to expand or upgrade their facilities. This report summarizes
Reinvestment Fund’s 2018 update to the LSA analysis, including results for selected regions as well as relevant changes to the methodology and data sources used in the analysis.